7 Top Social Media Agencies at the 2016 Shorty Awards

Each year, the Shorty Awards honors the best in social media by influencers, brands and organizations. With the 8th Annual Shorty Awards set for April 11th, winners in the brand and organization categories were recently announced with influencer winners set to be named on the night of the Awards.

In our third year covering the Shorty’s, we have seen the level of work get better each year. And the trend continues this year with a line-up of awesome social media projects and campaigns. With all this great work, we wanted to take the time to show some love to the best agencies and brands blowing up our social feeds in 2015.

Top Creative Agencies from the 2016 Shorty Awards

DDB Chicago is the award-winning advertising agency with U.S. offices in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. Founded in 1949, DDB Chicago also took home awards in Best in Food & Beverage and Best in Twitter for their Lovin’ The Super Bowl campaign with McDonald’s.

The Lovin’ The Super Bowl social media campaign was a unique take on promotion, where McDonald’s decided to show love to other advertisers during the Super Bowl. The brand sent out positive tweets about each commercial and even gave away product the brands were advertising through giveaways.

McDonald’s became the most retweeted brand in a single day, saw a 96% increase in positive sentiment for the brand, took over 23% of all brand conversations during the Super Bowl, and gained tons of media coverage in top publications like Forbes, Adweek and more.

Atomic 212 took home the Small Agency of the Year award for their innovative media buying strategies over the past year. The full-service media agency also won the award for Best in Consumer Brand, Best in Media Buying Strategy and Best in Technology for Lucy The Robot – a remote controlled telepresence robot that could move and interact with the world via audio and video devices.

Atomic 212 and Double Robotics came up with an ingenious strategy to break into the Australian and Asians markets by having their Double telepresence robot wait in line to buy the first iPhone 6s in the world. They paired the robot with a human user, Lucy Kelly, and she interacted with the people in line with her.

Media from around the world came to cover the robot, and the marketing campaign resulted in 4,000 stories in digital and print, over $44 million in sales opportunities, and brand favorability went through the roof.

CP+B LA won Best in Financial Services for their work with Paypal and Airbnb. To raise awareness and let users of Airbnb know about Paypal’s payment option, the two brands partnered with CP+B to create the Meet Halfway site. This digital tool would help calculate the halfway point between friends living in different places and encourage them to meet halfway. The site would work for any city in the world, and if you add more friends, the tool would automatically recalculate the halfway point for all friends.

Friends could share results via Facebook and use Airbnb to find property at the halfway point. Also, if you used Paypal at checkout, you would receive $50 off your stay.

By the end of the campaign, over 35,000 halfway points were found and led to 64,239 nights booked on Airbnb and 18,539 new Paypal user sign-ups.

CP+B also took home Best in Emojis for their Emoji Ordering with Domino’s and Best in Facebook for the Silent Ads campaign with Hotels.com.

Mistress won Best in Data Visualization for the #Cokenomics campaign with Netflix and their hit new show Narcos. To connect audiences with the show Narcos and have them fall in love with the story, Mistress created the #Cokenomics social campaign that used infographics and other visuals to display the scale of Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel’s reign. They coincided infographics and actually moments from the show to drive viewership and present facts that just couldn’t fit into the show.

The campaign yielded over 100,000 engagements on social media and was even featured by the Wall Street Journal.

Mistress also won Best in Television for their overall social media campaign with Narcos.

Breensmith and Friends of Animals won Best in Pets & Animals for their viral video RuffLife. To raise awareness and encourage pet owners to spay and neuter their pets, Breensmith used humor to show how millions of dogs and cats are living in horrible conditions.

The video was featured on Reddit, Fast Company and Adweek , earning a ton of unpaid media impressions.

Havas Worldwide Chicago won Best in Multi-Platform Campaign for their brand revitalization project with Reynolds Wrap. To reach a younger audience and tap into Instagram’s foodie culture, Havas created the world’s first Instagram cookbook called Endless Table. The campaign consisted of overhead shots of eight food-filled tables that stitched together to create one long “Endless Table” on Reynolds Instagram feed. Each week the company would post a new dish and for each dish they created a sub-account with the step-by-step recipe.

The Endless Table campaign garnered more than 263 million impressions and saw Reynolds Instagram following increases by more than 1300%.

Ludomade won Best in Entertainment for Peanutize Me! – a site where you can create an animated version of yourself to look like a Peanuts character. The Peanutize Me! campaign was created to generate awareness for the film The Peanuts Movie, so that regular people, celebrities and influencers could create the Peanuts version of themselves and easily share it via social media.

The Peanutizme.com site generated over 17 million visits, 11 million unique impressions and over 7 million characters created to date.

Maximize Your Company’s Social Life

The social media landscape is changing everyday, and you need the experts to help you navigate the space. Now only if you knew a website that had a list of some of the top digital and social media agencies out there…

With our list of the top digital marketing agencies, Agency Spotter is helping some of the biggest brands and companies find their next creative partner in social, digital, design and more! If we work for the big guys, we can definitely help you find your next agency. So try us out, we’re the easiest agency search out there!

Daniel is THE marketing guru at Agency Spotter. He holds a degree in Journalism from Georgia State University and has worked in the startup world ever since graduating. When Daniel isn't tearing up the marketing scene, you can usually find him playing basketball or enjoying a delicious bowl of Chipotle...

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